So do you like medical history in your curriculum

So do you like medical history in your curriculum?

I’m not talking about taking a history - that’s something we all have to come to terms with learning. No, I am interested to see what people think about learning about the history of medicine. Galen, Avicenna, Lister and the like.

Why should you be interested in cramming more into the already pretty packed 4-6 years we “enjoy”? Well, simply, it will have two benefits that I guarantee you’ll be interested in.The first is that, quite frankly, if we learn our history, we’re less likely to repeat the tremendous messes that our ancestors have found themselves in. In truth, as a profession we have already made a considerable number of catastrophic errors that even a fresher on Tuesday morning with a brass pig stamp on their hand could begin to question. Of course there are those who more complex errors. To look back over our history, allows us to find those mistakes and not do what they did. That’s putting it simply (and facetiously) but I do believe there is an awful lot to learn from these blunders.

For example, and I hate to bring it up, if we consider the pandemic. Through studying, and being familiar with, the conditions that stopped (or proliferated) the coronavirus pandemic, we can far better equip ourselves to tackle the next pandemic that will hit us. Secondly, and perhaps more immediately useful, is the fact that historical anecdotes help facts “stick” in your head. Many of our lecturers employ this technique and often use tales of discovery and strange experiments to preface a key point. Whether intentional or not, that story can provide a neat little story to help you remember what the important detail of that topic was. You’re definitely going to be more likely to remember the importance of electricity in the human body after learning that Luigi Galvanni liked making severed frog legs dance by sticking electrodes on them (look it up). This can be scaled up to remembering larger subjects. It can be helpful to look at the entire topic in the context of it’s discovery and development. I invite anyone who doubts otherwise to listen to Bedside Rounds. I owe my understanding of sensitivity vs specificity pretty much entirely to his episode on the history of diagnostic testing, where he discusses how those concepts formed in the minds of medical researchers during the early 20th century. There are some under fully human (so also very strange) stories out there in medical history. Yes, you can probably tell that I very much enjoy learning about history after reading all this. And while, yes, this may just be me wanting to indulge in my interests as part of my course, I believe a dash of a history into our learning could make things more interesting and more memorable.

Written by Louis Davenport